Siblings
Part IV: Knights' Attack
7
A small, colourful procession: three humans, two horses, an eagle and a cat, all moving slowly down a hot, sun-filled sandstone canyon towards a dark opening in its north-western wall. Of the men, one wore full plate armour, slightly tarnished, yet still serviceable; on his head, he had a glorious helm which had once belonged to Sir Tain the Noble, and which had found its way to his hands through, most improbably, an orc encampment; he had an enchanted mace by his side and bore a heirloom shield with a ring and a rhodelia in his right hand; and was, clearly, verily uncomfortable in the heat. But, were one to judge from the spring in his step, nonetheless happy.
The man in front wore bloodstained old gold and dark brown; for, like his sister, he had chosen to discard for the moment his cloak of shadows. There was a cruel blade strapped to his back; an Abyssal greensteel knife at his belt; an intricate tattoo on his forehead, above a pair of most inhuman eyes; and the feeling was that, when said eyes interrupted scanning the surroundings, it was just to look at them from the above, with an eagle's far, sharp sight.
There was an amused scowl on the man's face, for a day's practice had not yet been enough to master the technique of shifting one's perspective while in motion, and the man had only just stumbled and had barely recovered his balance in time to preserve his nigh-flawless, if rightfully sordid, image in the first man's eyes.
The woman, finally, wore light grey and light green under her rosy hair, her brown eyes and her two scars, one through the chin, one across the eye; she had a sword, a dagger, a quiver and a bow; and, just as on her brother's neck there glittered and glimmered a golden necklace, so did on her own glitter and glimmer the silver one which had once belonged to their sister. She smirked lightly, because, unlike the man in armour, she had noticed what misfortune had befallen her brother; and then, as she realised its cause, she frowned in the direction of her horse-riding cat. After all, within a few moments—
"A fair plan, Delryn," Sarevok was saying, "What of the scouting?"
"Surely my lady Imoen, even if invisible, cannot be expected to enter that place alone!" Anomen protested hotly. "And if she is to use her magic at ease, she must stand in the aft," he finished, and his brow must be frowning under his helmet.
"She will. The van, squire," Sarevok replied, picking up a sleeping Pangur by the scruff of his neck and presenting him to Anomen, "is the cat's task. She can see through his eyes," he explained, quite amused at the future paladin's surprise.
The dazed cat tried, affably, to scratch out his holder's own eyes; and the viability of the use of felids in warfare proved shortly a theme of much contention and dissent; yet, in the end, not half an hour later, Imoen was exploring the corridors of a ruined chapel for traps and enemies, even as her body stood behind the fighters, readying her magic and her bow alike.
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Soft, furred pads on slim, quiet paws, stepping precisely on the toes, like a ballet dancer: hind paw in the place of forepaw, hind paw for forepaw. The pupils of sensitive eyes, widely dilated in the near complete darkness; ears, moving, listening on to whispers, murmurs, undertones; a nose and a mouth, several times superior to a human's, scenting; erect, alert whiskers, feeling for air currents, vibrations and eddies, speaking of obstructions in the path and of the prey's presence— A cat is hunting.
No good fighter becomes such without developing a feel for the surroundings, without extending one's awareness slightly outside one's own body—to the tip of one's sword; and then, yet slightly further on. Any fighter's mind would cave in under the amount of information reaching the simple cat's senses.
There was a movement in the shadows, and Pangur froze, intent, with one forepaw lifted.
Shades.
He stepped lightly over one defunct tripwire, slid under another; the stench of carrion carried over from beyond the corner.
Ghouls. Ghasts.
The acrid scent of embalming fluid.
Mummies.
The distant clatter of a restless set of bones.
Skeletons.
A distinct, intimately familiar smell: blood. The corridor widened into a slightly larger chamber, with opened caskets standing in a circle on the stained floor; Imoen told the invisible cat to stay put, and, with a bit of regret, returned to her own eyes and ears. "The corridor is guarded by shades. There is a trap on the other side; then, a turn; then, a room with all sorts of undead. I haven't seen the vampires, but there are open coffins."
"They will show," Sarevok said, with a cheerful undertone in his businesslike voice which none could mistake for anything but happiness at the thought of the impeding hecatomb. "Potions of clarity," he added, handing a small flask to Imoen, who knew, vaguely, that a vampire could charm or dominate its victim. "Orc-made, but they should work fine for humans," he finished, casting a lazy, resolutely incurious look in Anomen's direction.
A grimace of distaste crossed the squire's face, but he took the flask; drunk the contents; and, shortly, prayed.
His prayer was heard; and, for a moment, the siblings must avert their eyes. Helm's raw might, felt with Imoen's divine senses, was neither kind nor unkind, only terribly fair and honest; but seeing one's all imperfections in perfect detail, even when one is aware of them and refuses to pay any heed to them, is a fearsome and startling experience.
Sharp and bright against the light of day, the wave of sheer power settled on the party in a multitude of little flames, before fading suddenly: they could, again, see. The vampires' guardians: the masses of writhing shadows, and the foul, bloated bodies, and the tall, desiccated, pestilential corpses tightly wrapped in their bandages, and the skeletons; as the party moved slowly down the entrance corridor, Helm's divine touch repelled and disoriented them all, leaving them easy prey to Sarevok and Imoen.
Of the siblings, Imoen, at least, was grateful for it, for she had never fought a mummy or a shadow before, and was glad that in her first encounter, the undead were fatally disoriented; but, the feeling nagged her, the vampires—
She fired another flame arrow at a mummy, which promptly burst into flames, and took a quick look through Pangur's eyes. The cat, in his feline manner, had disregarded her order completely, and was now peeking curiously into one of the caskets. It was empty.
Down, Pangur! she thought firmly as her hands found an arrow in her quiver.
Whadd'ya take me for? A dog?! the cat snorted, and, demonstratively, jumped into the coffin, raising clouds of dust.
Absently, his mistress shot out the arrow, this time at the easy target of a ghoul, and cast a look over her shoulder, to see if no creature assailed the party from behind. Helm's blessing though it were, she was simply not used to the kind of fighting where the enemy did not fight back. It made her paranoid. It felt too easy. It was genuine, though; the party reached the chamber at the end of the corridor without a hurt.
This, Imoen could now see in the conjured light, was a columbarium; hence, perhaps, the skeletons. There were two corridors in the opposite wall, and the caskets, and the smell of blood, and a stained floor, and an invisible angry cat she would swear was now all grey, without his rosy points; but still no vampires.
"Show yourselves," fed up, she demanded aloud at last, when the cursory check was over.
"We know that you are here," Sarevok added, lightly growling, scanning the ceiling.
"Foul leeches! Have you no courage to face us?!" Anomen, now bathed only in the afterglow of his holy aura, but with his mace in hand, finished.
A flapping followed, of a great multitude of leathery wings which completely eclipsed the light conjured by Imoen and the light of her brother's eyes; when it finished, the vampires were finally there.
One stood in the entrance through which the party had come: dressed in a noble, black and silver garb, and possessed of waist-long, shiny black hair, he looked clearly the eldest and the leader of the five. He was pale, predatory, and he carried himself proudly; and he stank much more than all the others.
He had with him a pair of who must have been middle-aged men while still human, one clad in a casual garb, the other in a mage's robe; Anomen jerked lightly at the latter's sight. The last two of the spawn stood across the chamber, in the openings to the side corridors; these, in turn, had the looks of young humans, and twins: a teenage boy and a girl.
"Lassal," Sarevok said to him civilly; and then, over a stifled cry of, "You know this—?!", "You must really have fallen out of your mistress' favour if she sent you here."
"Mook is dead," the vampire replied. He had a pleasant voice.
Sarevok shrugged. "She is. Or she is not. We live in an age of wonders, Lassal, and resurrection is possible. You are to tell me something."
"Mistress Bodhi awaits you," Lassal said, expectantly.
"I will meet her," the man replied, surprising the vampire, before adding, "Is that all? Then, I believe, it is time to kill the messenger."
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Slaying a vampire is no easy matter; in a rapid, upward jerk, Sarevok skewered the one in the mage robe on the Chaos Edge, only to have him dissolve into mist and disappear in the shadow of the grave.
Anomen, in a laudable fit of inspiration, had been murmuring his prayers already when Sarevok and Lassal had been speaking, and was now, Imoen understood, for the moment protected from the vampires' life-draining touch. That left only her, who must get out of the trap as soon as possible, and pelt the vampires from afar with arrows and magic.
It had taken some effort of the squire, she understood further, to forego his immediate instincts, and protect himself instead of her first; she was glad that, since he had worked that out himself, he had not forgotten this in the heat of battle. He was much slower than she, after all, and he could not make himself invisible.
She ran through the gap left after the wizard; ran past Lassal, now hissing, growling and apparently trying to claw out Sarevok's heart; ran a little bit up the entrance corridor; started to cast Melf's Minute Meteors—
The mêlée was not glorious, even though Anomen Delryn would say so later; it was tiring, and tedious, and entirely devoid of scintillating tactics to be studied for generations to come; and the only reason why a body might ever find it worth of notice is that Imoen of Candlekeep almost lost her life in it.
The wizard was, perhaps, the reason of it: once incarnate again, he cast a spell of lightning bolt in the closed quarters, for vampires barely need fear lightning, and humans, a lot. The lightning bounced from the recessed walls of the burial vault in a dervish's mad dance; Sarevok, snarling, pulled his armoured squire down to the ground, below the level at which the dance took place, and started to cast a spell; Imoen decided to move into the fray.
On hands and knees, hiding herself behind a corner as she best could, and started to throw at the mage the third or fourth round of the small fiery balls she had summoned during the fight. The first few minute meteors, to her surprise, returned to her, burning her and bruising her; then, as she was to give up, she started to hit her target; and, promptly, the weakened vampire vanished again, and this time, the wisp of mist headed for one of the coffins in the middle of the room.
Pangur, peeping carefully over the edge of the casket, hissed, Watch out!
When the last vampire still fighting grabbed her from behind, she threw the last of her missiles straight into its middle-aged man's face. The men came to help her, soon, and, together, they all managed to tear the creature off her and destroy it: Anomen fairly crushed its head, forcing it to try and return into its coffin. But the black hole was already there.
The black hole was just that: utter nothingness, a piece of her self, missing. Not coldness, the likes of which she experienced whenever her other self emerged; simply… lack. Lack of memory; lack of expertise—her fingers suddenly felt clumsy and unskilled, and when she tried to think of a single cantrip, any single cantrip, it was all simply gone; and some other, less definable lack— If one insisted on finding a comparison, it felt like some parts of her memory after Irenicus' torture had.
She shivered. Irenicus had a sister, and her name was Bodhi.
She kept on shivering, rolled into a ball on the floor in her corner of the dark passage; there was nothing she wanted more than to stay there, curled up like this, and die.
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"Apparently, my sister nobly decided to die and spare us any future fighting," a coldly furious voice was saying as a small, warm, mute body climbed into her lap and started to nudge her chin with its head and lick off her tears with a rough, grate-like tongue. "Take her and the cat outside, Delryn, and make sure that she properly peruses the scroll. I can stake the vampires myself."
A few moments of being chivalrously, apologetically carried out of the grave into the sun followed; then, a few moments of reading a scroll and feeling the blessing contained in it—what had the priest said? That, since no one knew where Waukeen was, they were taking power from Lliira?—and then, a great tiredness. The hole had been filled, stoppered slowly, painstakingly; but now—
"Now, you ought to rest, my lady," Anomen Delryn was saying. "You look better, already, 'tis true, but—"
"No," Imoen yawned. "You managed, yesterday. And I was silly. We almost had them all already as it was—"
Heya. Fine again, I see? Good.
Pangur was now visible again, and meticulously washing the dust off his fur. He cast a lazy, unconcerned look in her direction, and returned to his task.
"Forgive me, my lady, but you really would do well to rest for a while," Anomen repeated. "And I ought to aid your brother."
"Sure," she replied, suddenly realising that the squire wanted to get up and do something with each and every earnest pore of his skin, and that only his politeness kept him by her side. "I get it, Anomen. Go."
Anomen stood up and, remorsefully, left her alone with a cat; and, for a moment, and feeling utterly childish for feeling that, because she would do exactly the same in his place, she wished that adventurers were not nearly so damned practical.
I nearly died here, you know, she complained to the world in general.
Chick's worried 'bout ya, y'know, she heard in her thoughts, and sighed. At least the fellow female understood what she felt.
Then, vaguely wondering how Pangur could tell this time, she fell into a brief doze.
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Male voices, reaching her through the haze of dream. "You know who that wizard was."
"Aye, that I do. He was Firkraag's minion. The one who brought Sir Keldorn and us here yesterday."
"I thought so. I also found this by the one which nearly got Imoen; it appears that you were correct, squire. He used to be Windspear, and the other two fledglings must have been his children. Is there, by the way, any connection between the name and the fee?"
"Garren Windspear was the previous title-holder of these lands," Anomen replied angrily. "And, knowing Firkraag's methods, 'tis verily hard for me to stay the doubt that he was swindled out of them."
"The dragon is cutting the loose ends, then. He let Lassal take the wizard in exchange for getting rid of the contenders to the fief, or a similar service— Keep the ring, Delryn. It is enchanted against fire."
"I truly cannot—"
"You earned it. Now, stop blushing, and tell me: the Lord Delryn is a baronet, is he not? And landless?"
"In truth…"
"Stop blushing, Delryn. It really does not become you. You were, perhaps, about to tell me that you are landless merchants ennobled two or three generations ago, were you not?"
"Aye. 'Tis the truth. And my lord Delryn is, rightly, only a baronet."
"My foster father bought his own title, Delryn. Even if I still held it, you would still be little less than me— However, what occurs to me is that, under the circumstances, the slayer of the dragon will be fully entitled to assume the mantle of the Windspear barony."
There was a prolonging silence. "'Tis… I would rather not speak of it till the wyrm is dead. But if the Lady Imoen wishes the title, then I swear on— I swear that I shan't stand in her path."
"Should she wish the title, Delryn, you must do more: she is neither Amnish nor noble, and has no one to represent her before the courts. Should she not, the land should follow the signet. Keep it."
What followed was an extremely complicated silence, and Imoen considered waking up, when she heard a brief noise; and then, her brother spoke up again. This time, he was audibly amused.
"Alas, poor Lassal. I knew him well."
Anomen, clearly thankful for the end of the silence, asked, "You did?"
Sarevok laughed lightly. "No. Not really. He escaped me once and killed one of my people, but I hardly think that makes us blood brothers. He gave a good fight, though."
"'Twas a glorious fight!" Anomen said fervently.
Another light laugh. "If you say so, squire. And, in any case… The wedding gift is arranged. It is time to marry."
"M- Marry?!"
She did not fault the squire; she barely believed her own ears.
"Marry?" Anomen Delryn demanded. "You— You are marrying?!"
There was a brief silence, followed by a dry, "Apparently, I am."
The squire gasped. "Why? Who?"
"The orcish chief's daughter. He is rather old-fashioned, and there were certain... mutual guarantees required— You wouldn't have believed that we agreed to the trust only on our words, would you, squire?"
A silence, unanswered; and so, Sarevok continued his teasing, "What? Do I receive no congratulations? Or condolences?"
Anomen Delryn was undaunted. "You— You are marrying one of those... filthy, uncouth, homicidal, untrustworthy… heathen beasts?!"
The rejoinder hovered between amusement and boredom. "As I told you, yes."
"Then I—" A deep sigh. "I refuse to go among the orcs."
The response was rather bored. "Why? Haven't we discussed this already? You agreed, if I remember correctly."
"'Twas hardly a discussion," Anomen muttered rebelliously. "I refuse to bear witness to such blasphemy."
"And here was I, thinking of making you my best man," Sarevok answered lightly as Imoen sighed: the squire definitely belonged to a world where the word 'marriage' meant something— Suddenly, her brother grew more serious. "You should appreciate the opportunity, squire. You will be able to to study your enemy in its natural environment. Is there no line to that effect in your dogma as well?"
Another deep sigh. "Aye. 'Know your foe.'" Then, after a brief silence, a surprised, petulant, "How do you know that so well, Anchev?"
"The creed? Obviously, following the selfsame principle," Sarevok replied smugly; and then, in a few steps, he moved to Imoen, knelt by her, and said, "Little sister. You have been awake for ten minutes at least. You know of my happy circumstance. Shall we?"
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Among the orcs, women are property.
Among the orcs, women are property, child-bearers and chattel, to be possessed, bought and sold; and since the orcs have no respect for their dim, foul females, they see no reason to hold any for those of any other race; for the orcs, as any other race, believe that any other race is inferior to their own.
The speaker of these words had been an elf, and elves bear no kind feelings towards orcs; and that one elf, in particular, had even less reason to do so. Kivan had, perhaps, never told Imoen what Tazok had exactly done to Deheriana, judging that too gruesome a tale for the ears of a barely grown-up human; or, perhaps, he had. Perhaps, once, drunk, infuriated by an attempt to cheer his spirits with a word or a jest too many, he had told her exactly and in very particular detail what precisely Tazok had done to his lover.
The drow are much like the orcs, he had remarked on another occasion, gazing in the direction of a drow who would, one day, become Imoen's enemy. Oloth dos! she had replied, Wash your mouth, darthiir! The drow's cruelty, like the drow, is sophisticated and elegant, perfected through millennia of unbroken exercise; the orcs' is like the orcs themselves: mundane, trivial and uncouth. I should flail you for just speaking of the two in the same sentence, jaluk—You can wish, Viconia. You can wish.
And Imoen had then thought that elegance is no excuse for evil, even though elegant evil holds much allure for some humans; for humans love beautiful things, and are willing to excuse much, be it only beautifully presented and performed. But she had remembered that instance as the only one when Kivan and Viconia had agreed on any single subject; and she even remembered it now, when so much else was gone.
Among the orcs, Sarevok felt like fish in water.
He couldn't be marrying à la orc for the first time; he knew too well how to do it; his sister didn't want to know how many corpses of his previous monstrous brides had littered the landscape whilst the nobles in Baldur's Gate had thought of pawning off their daughters to him.
This particular orc bride… existed. There wasn't much more to be told of her.
They entered the orc caves together with the horses; the inside was dark and malodorous, filled with the stench of sweat and grease. They passed through a bottleneck into a larger cavern; there were side passages to the left and right, but they headed straight for the centre, where there was a fire and stone benches around the fire, separated from the rest of the place by a ring of standing stones and totems.
To the left and right, there were orcs, mulling about, watching them either askew, suspiciously or with open hatred and contempt: porcine faces, greyish-green skin, red eyes, an armoury of bared weaponry, grunts and snarls and barks and open threats. Sarevok was as tall and as threatening as he might possibly be without reaching to his divine powers, golden, proud and challenging like the eagle on his hand; Imoen, with her own familiar on her shoulder, found herself, prosaically, surreptitiously counting the enemies. Between her, and Anomen, and what she saw through Pangur's eyes, and what her brother saw through Altair's eyes, they should soon have a fairly good estimate of their numbers.
She did not have to be told that she must know her enemies; she had learnt that herself through countless trials and errors, sometimes on time, sometimes almost too late; one of them had been when she had infiltrated her brother's own camp of cutthroats.
There were five or six orcs around the central fire, some sitting, some afoot, shamans and warriors alike; the one who came out to meet them was an old male, hunched and ritually scarred and with a necklace of skulls over a leather armour laced with hundreds of fire hardened bones; and, in his hand, a club which looked like nothing but a femur. The one who stood by him must be the bride herself; the first female Imoen had seen thus far in this place.
She was not fully orc, and that, perhaps, explained why Dig Dag was willing to give her over to a mere human; her face was more human than orcish in shape, even if her hair was black and coarse, her skin was green, her ears were lupine and she had a jutting jaw with boar-like tusks; she was tall and muscular and dressed in skins and rags. Anomen shot her a look of immediate dislike; Sarevok paid her no attention.
The orc barked out something at the man in his own tongue; the man replied, in the same language and tone; and then added something much longer, something which sounded like a clear challenge. (He must be asking why we weren't told about the wizard, Imoen thought.) The orc growled and threatened, and let his club be much better seen; the man laughed, released Altair into the air and said something which immediately relieved the orc's tension. Then, he took a bag from Anomen, and presented Lassal's long-haired head to Dig Dag.
The orc examined it and barked out a question. (Why haven't we brought them all? Imoen decided.) Sarevok folded his arms and fired off a curt answer. (Go and see for yourself that they are all dead. They were: in their dealing with the vampires, Anomen and Sarevok had been nothing if not meticulous. Since staking a vampire is temporary measure at best, they had taken the staked bodies out of the grave and set them in as deep a spot of the stream as they found; and in the sun. And then cut the heads off.)
In the present, Dig Dag must be satisfied with both his gift and his future son-in-law's impudence; he snarled, and an orc took away the head; another snarl, and two horns were brought, filled to the brim with some strong alcohol which made Imoen's eyes water with its very smell.
She sighed, internally. Wine was one thing; but she'd really prefer her brother to lay off this sort of spirits. It could not be good for him, even if he, as he demonstrated at present, could, indeed, drink it all in one go.
He finished; he threw the empty horn on the floor; he looked critically at his father-in-law, who finished, too, and laughed heartily, and pushed his daughter, who was watching the whole exchange with an expression Imoen could not decipher at all, in her newlywed husband's direction; then, he must have called Altair to him, for there was the sound of her wings, and the eagle settled before the female orc.
This could not be a usual part of the proceedings; the female gazed, rather alarmed, at her chief, who, in turn, again seemed on the point of ordering his people to attack the humans. Sarevok growled out something, and there was another collective relieving of tension as the she-orc approached the eagle, and took from her talons a ruby-and-emerald sheath of a Calishite scimitar.
Imoen wondered at the bride's absolutely noncommittal expression; Sarevok barked a short, unkind command in the half-orc's direction, and threw the reins of the horses to her. And then, as she took them, and left off, and departed the scene, with Altair following her, he, as though nothing had just happened, turned, again, to Dig Dag.
There was another brief exchange, growled and barked and snarled in the orcs' coarse tongue; and, presently, another orc was called, who led them out of the circle of stones and totems, and through this cave and that cave, until, at last, he showed them a portal, ornate in the flickering torchlight.
Beyond, there was darkness.
"The entrance to the maze," Sarevok said calmly.